Return Journey – Frank McNally on the (almost) forgotten pleasures of Italy

It was strange to be flying again, after almost two years on the ground. The novelty extended to having an empty middle seat beside me on the Ryanair to Bergamo. For a while, in fact, I had a breath-taking view all the way to the aisle until some last-minute redistribution from the plane's more crowded parts corrected that.

Even Italy seemed quiet at first. But then Bergamo is hardly a typical Italian city, hugging as it does the Alps and feeling in ways more Germanic than Latin. Arriving near midnight, I found it at its most serene: the sub-alpine calm of Viale Papa Giovanni XXIII bathed in a waning moon that almost aligned with the halo of stars on a Virgin Mary overlooking us from the top of a church dome. I had to remind myself that this beatific scene was in the same city from which, in March 2020, we watched those apocalyptic pictures of army trucks loaded with coffins and departing in darkness to relieve pressure on the overwhelmed local cemetery.

The only signs of that trauma there now, I found, were a universal respect for mask-wearing in shops and on public transport. Not that I used much of the latter, anyway.

Bypassing the funicular next day, for example, I walked the ear-popping route up to Bergamo Alta, the old walled city, then made another precipitous trek from there to Castello di San Vigilio, which looks down even on upper Bergamo and offers a 360-degree panorama of everything from mountain valleys to the skyscrapers of Milan, 60 kilometres away.

Coarse Notes – Frank McNally on the drunken parrots of ancient Rome and other surprise language lessons

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End of the Line – Frank McNally on the dubious legacy of the last Earl of Clanrickarde

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Fighting Words – Frank McNally on the best and worst songs of the Northern Troubles

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Keeping Up – On eternal youth, ‘elegant variation’, and the perils of gender-neutral language

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Lovely as it was, the ubiquity of open-air dining in the narrow, wind-less streets last week seemed to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors

After that, I descended gradually into the chaos of Italy. This started with a train to Bologna, a place that feels southern, although it isn’t. Maybe it’s the ubiquitous graffiti, or the dominating presence of a university population, that makes the city seem more anarchic than the reality.

The truth is that "Red Bologna", as it used to be known, has long been among Europe's better organised towns. In the second half of last century, it was a poster child for the communists who controlled it. Never mind Mussolini's trains, Bologna's buses ran on time, and long before most of Europe had the same idea the times were displayed on electronic read-outs at stops.

But lovely as it was, the ubiquity of open-air dining in the narrow, wind-less streets last week seemed to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors. And like ours, the local pandemic rules are not always logical. One oddity, I noticed, is that you can’t buy alcohol in shops after 6pm, even to drink at home, although you can have as much of it as you like if seated in a restaurant or bar.

By contrast, I also had the strange experience when visiting Bologna’s oldest osteria – an establishment that serves only drink while encouraging customers to bring their own food – of having to abandon my beer and going back outside in search of lunch.

This proved an unexpected challenge. Amid the wall-to-wall street dining, I struggled to find a takeaway panino anywhere and became mildly lost before, 15 minutes later, being reunited with my beer. It was much less crowded inside the bar than out.

I’ll come back to my Ravenna side-trip another day. But then there was the return journey to Bergamo, which also turned into a bit of a saga. When the more direct mid-afternoon trains got booked out, I was reduced to a cheap but complicated two-change option, via Verona and Rovato.

This started calmly. Then the train grew more and more crowded until I was having flashbacks of my first Italy-in-August experience, from 1980s Interrail. The rolling stock is better now, but the numbers getting on at every station, and the size of their suitcases, hadn’t changed.

Also, the first train was late enough that we would have missed the second if that hadn’t been even later. But we ran out of luck with the third. Then, just when I was resigned to missing the flight home, an unexpected regional service turned up and, despite a lightning storm, got me there on time.

By now I was down to my last facemask, an improvised cloth kind, albeit with two layers of cotton as I pointed out indignantly to the female airport attendant who gave out to me for not having the proper medical variety.

Nor did the sartorial criticism end there. The young man at passport control pointed at my chest and commented: "With that shirt, you can definitely leave the country." As I had worried briefly in Bologna but since forgotten in the stress, I was wearing an old Juventus jersey: something that remains unacceptable in many parts of Italy, pandemic or no pandemic.